The Conclusion of The Things They Carried

Clint Kadera

Mrs. Hurlbert

Juniors Honors English

November 25, 2010

The Conclusion of The Things They Carried

                In the final chapter of The Things They Carried, The Lives of the Dead, author Tim O’Brien reminisces of a childhood friend, nine-year-old Linda.  Though “…tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood…”, O’Brien explains Linda as more than his first date or first girlfriend, but as his first love.  On Tim and Linda’s initial outing (chaperoned by Tim’s parents), Linda wore a white-tasseled, red hat, the same that “…Santa’s elves wear.”  Linda began to wear the cap to school, dad after day without removing it.  Inevitably, teasing occurred.  This lead to another fifth grader pulling the hat off in class, revealing the “…glossy whiteness of her scalp.”  Linda went on to die from a brain tumor.   Directly after Tim heard about her death, he walked home from school without telling anyone.  Through the living room window, he had a mirage of Linda walking down Main Street alone.  She wore a pink dress and shiny black shoes while playing a game, laughing and running up the empty road, a yellow streetlight illuminating her.  Linda asked Tim why he was so sad, and in response, he told her because she was dead.  Linda nodded, reached out to touch his wrists and said “Timmy, stop crying.  It doesn’t matter.” Following the open casket service Tim attended, he began to have planned, lucid dreams.  Tim would spend time with Linda, asking questions about death.  Still to this day, author Tim O’Brien creates these dreams, dreams of “Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights” of the rink.

                To emphasize visual imagery, the author steadily uses similes.  When describing the stuffed cadaver, the author used the line “The skin at her cheeks was stretched out tight like the rubber skin on a balloon just before it pops open.” This sentence, amongst the entire depiction of the funeral, was the most relatable piece of the book for me.  When I attended my Great Uncle’s funeral, I too believed the body in the casket was not the man I knew.  He was too still, too quiet, too suffocatingly plastic to be my Great Uncle, “It didn’t seem real.”  I swore as well that the moment I turned my back to the body, my Great Uncle would jump out of the casket, grab my shoulders, “…and laugh and yell out my name.”  He never did.  I could picture O’Brien’s entire description. 

                Also in this chapter, O’Brien repeats three key colors: red, yellow, and pink.  Red is the color of Linda’s cap.  A stimulant, red represents both love (between Tim and Linda) and war (the brain tumor).  It’ s the most passionate color.  In China amongst other countries, red paradoxly represents happiness, prosperity, and good luck.  On the same day Tim hears about Linda’s death, he sees a hallucination of her running under a yellow streetlight.  In his dreams he sees her ice-skating under yellow floodlights.  Yellow is warmth and happiness.  The two moments the author uses yellow are two moments of cheerfulness.  During many wars, yellow ribbons are worn by the soldiers’ wives as a sign of hope, praying their husbands would return safe.  On a negative note, in Egypt yellow represented mourning.  In the Middle Ages it signified the dead.  Pink, within United States culture, is a color of youth, of little girls.  In O’Brien’s hallucination of Linda running, she is in a pink dress.  The dress is a paradox.  Linda is in the pink dress, or just in pink.  The saying “in the pink” means someone or something is healthy.  In reality, Linda is dead, but in Tim’s mind, she is alive, in the pink, or healthy. 

The chapter, The Lives of the Dead adds to the theme of Tim O’Brien’s book, that fiction can overcome reality, and more specifically, death.   He addresses (primarily through metaphors) how he himself is a man skimming across the surface of his own history, “…moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when [he does] take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later,” he’s still a man troubled by death.  The stories that help make his dead friends come alive are the stories that help make him stay alive.  Although O’Brien stresses over death, he preaches that death is beautiful, that death is nothing but the stopping of creating new stories about their lives.   O’Brien makes it a point to ask the reader what is alive and what isn’t alive?  He asks what is real and what isn’t real?  The author’s fear is the fear of the unknown, but writing helps him to cope with the thoughts and memories.  O’Brien proves fiction can overcome reality.